Cisco Announces Compulsory Acquisition of TANDBERG

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor

Cisco announced that it has completed its voluntary offer for video communications provider TANDBERG.

With this transaction, Cisco (News - Alert) creates an extensive combined product portfolio with the inclusion of TANDBERG product line and accelerates Cisco's vision of changing the way people communicate and collaborate by delivering simple, unique and interoperable collaboration experiences, the company said.

With the close of this transaction, Fredrik Halvorsen, the former CEO of TANDBERG, becomes senior vice president and leader of the new TelePresence Technology Group, Cisco said. This newly-formed group includes three fully integrated businesses that will focus on endpoints, infrastructure and Cisco TelePresence cloud services.

According to Marthin De Beer (News - Alert), senior vice president, Emerging Technologies Business Group, Cisco, telepresence, along with Cisco's entire rich collaboration portfolio, powers this new way of working where everyone, everywhere, can be more productive through the pervasive use of video and face-to-face collaboration.

Through the combined offering, Cisco TelePresence business provides customers with access to a fully integrated architecture, a comprehensive network-based endpoint and infrastructure portfolio designed to help provide multivendor interoperability and a suite of unique experiences, customizable applications and flexible deployment models, the company said.

Under the terms of the tender offer, and following the completion of the compulsory acquisition of shares, Cisco will have purchased all of the outstanding shares of TANDBERG for 170 Norwegian kroner per share for an aggregate purchase price of approximately 19 billion Norwegian kroner or $3.3 billion, the company said.

Cisco expects the acquisition to be dilutive to non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2010 and accretive to non-GAAP earnings in fiscal year 2011, company officials said.

The combined Cisco TelePresence portfolio retains the full range of endpoints, infrastructure products and flexible deployment options from Cisco and TANDBERG, the company said. Customers are also provided with a comprehensive set of solution platforms for horizontal and industry applications.

The integrated infrastructure includes offerings and services that allow customers to enjoy exceptional intra- and intercompany collaboration experiences, high-performance multipoint meetings, and any-to-any interoperability. The service includes robust management and scheduling capabilities and highly secure usability features like "One Button to Push" and "Continuous Presence."

Cisco TelePresence also includes a set of media services for advanced recording, streaming, transcribing, transcoding and video analytics capabilities.

Beyond interoperability across company boundaries, the combined Cisco TelePresence portfolio includes features that facilitate any-to-any video interoperability, company officials said.

To advance native telepresence interoperability, Cisco is launching the TIP Open Source project and will publish the TIP source code libraries by July 1, 2010, the company said. Nine videoconferencing and telepresence vendors have licensed TIP so far.

With this acquisition, Cisco and TANDBERG worldwide ecosystem of partners that deliver and support world-class Cisco TelePresence and video collaboration experiences will continue to support customers.

Cisco also announced its wholly owned subsidiary Cisco Systems (News - Alert) Netherlands Holdings BV or "Cisco BV" shall acquire all of the outstanding issued shares in TANDBERG that are not currently owned by Cisco BV, by a compulsory acquisition of shares. Following completion of the compulsory acquisition, Cisco BV will be the sole shareholder of TANDBERG.

Earlier in April Cisco announced that it is expanding its portfolio of small business technology with new solutions to help small businesses connect their business to the world, secure their network and communicate effectively, TMCnet reported.

The new technologies include a family of energy-efficient, unmanaged switches and a wireless virtual private network firewall that small businesses can install themselves. Additional technologies include customer premises equipment that can enable service providers to deliver high-value services to small businesses, company officials said.

(source: http://data-voice-solutions.tmcnet.com/topics/telepresence/articles/83121-cisco-announces-compulsory-acquisition-tandberg.htm)